Rain, lightning strikes N.J. on eve of pleasant July 4 weather

Jerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerFirefighting crews work at the scene of a barn fire on Lamington Road in Bedminster earlier today after a lightning strike.

Monday's weather will make celebrating Independence Day easy: Sunny, with just a chance of rain.

Today was a different story.

A series of thunderstorms moved through the state starting around 5:30 a.m. By late afternoon, about 200 people in northern New Jersey and 60 in central New Jersey were left without power, said Stan Prater, a spokesman for Jersey Central Power and Light. Crews were expected to restore power by the end of tonight.

"As soon as the thunderstorms moved in, we started seeing outages," Prater said.

PSE&G also had reports of scattered power outages, but most had been restored this afternoon, said Roland Boggio, a company spokesman.

The storms also caused some damage throughout the state. In Bedminster, lightning sparked a barn fire on Lamington Road. The landowner removed all the animals from the barn before firefighters arrived, and there do not appear to have been any injured, said Bedminster Fire Department Lt. Chris Crowell.

About 11 fire units responded around 11 a.m., and it took more then four hours to contain the fire fully. The landowner had just received a new shipment of hay, and backhoes had to remove the smoldering hay for firefighters to spray it down, Crowell said.